Tuesday, 11 May 2010

Frosty weather

After loosing my blog of about three years on another site, I have decided to continue on this one and hopefully I will not loose this one.
It is a very late year this year. Frosts on the 11th of May. Not the worst I have had. Once there was a frost on the 1st of June. It was some time in the 1960s when the weather was normal.
So, the greenhouse is full of plants and I cannot get into it. I think that I may loose the peppers but everything else will be alright.
I have dug the last of the green manure in on this years brassica bed and limed the area. This is all ready for the brassicas to go in now when they have grown a little larger. I am weeding the runner beans and the sweet peas. The sweet peas seriously need tying up. This will be done this week.
The onions are still doing well despite the onion fly still being around. I want to cover these with envirofleece but I have not gone to get the blue water pipe to make the supports yet. The sweet cicerly is enormous. I am wondering if it is the mychorrhizal fungi that I put under it. Possible.
Spuds are coming through. With the frosts I think they might get a bit damaged, however this will not be fatal and they will just throw up new leaves. I have hoed them all up quite high but I still think that I could hoe them up even more.
Carrots, spinach, beetroot and parsnips are showing now. These need to be weeded but I will leave them until I have the other beds clear. The strawberries are doing very well and I think that if the frost does not kill off the flowers I will have a good harvest this year. The raspberries are a little thin because I transplanted them this year, however they are doing really well and I think that the mychorrhizal fungi have done their work well on them.
The row of early onward is doing well. I will put up the chicken wire to support them as and when. The winter cauliflowers are coming now but I wanted to leave them until they got a little bigger. I do need the ground for more peas though so they will have to be harvested soon. The good thing is that they tend to all come together so I can harvest and freeze them together and get a big area of ground to use quite quickly. Hopefully this is what will happen this year.
The new rhubarb is champagne. I just wanted a named variety because the rhubarb on the allotment is what I inherited 28 years ago. It is good rhubarb but I don't know its variety.
I have been harvesting quite a lot of rhubarb.
French climbing bean posts have been up for a while but no beans growing up them until the frosts have gone.
I have taken my first crop of comfrey leaves and put them into the digester. I have moved the tub down to the comfrey bed - a sensible thing to do because there was no point in transporting barrow loads of comfrey leaves up to the top of the allotment for no reason. I have put the tub on a pedistall so that I can put a watering can under the tap. It is full of comfrey now but when this rots down I will put some sweet cicerly and nettle in too.
The resultant 'tea' will be used to make charcoal mix. I am attempting to replicate Terra preta soil.
The three bins at the bottom of the allotment are full with very well rotted compost and I will be planting these with cucumber, squash and pumpkin. I was going to put the courgettes on there as well but they will survive anywhere so I will put them anywthere - except where I had them last year. Far too cold to put them out at the moment though.
The greenhouse is cocker at the moment. I cannot fit anything else into it at all. I am hoping to plant out the runner beans at the weekend if the weather changes.
I think that I will loose the two gardener's delight tomatoes I put outside by the shed. I am hoping that the shed, being fairly black, would produce a micro climate that will enable them to survive. Some hope though. We will see.